Chapter 3: Sentimental Regrets.

One year later, October 17th, Konoha.

Sitting back in his office chair, the third Hokage sighed tiredly as he awaited word from any of the squads he had sent on a mission of such importance to his village that he wouldn't dare defile it but adding something as pointless as a rank too it. Those who had heard the call and volunteered were well aware of the fact that there was a good chance that none of them would be coming back alive, and the only regret that Hiruzen had about sending those brave and loyal members of his village to an uncertain death was that he was stuck under his damn hat, trapped by it behind his desk. At this critical point in time the village needed leadership and a great deal of those able to command and wield such a force were currently risking the unknown in his place. He couldn't risk leaving the village defenseless now over a personal grudge and false hope.

It had been just bit over a year since the infamous 'Jester' attack on the tenth of Octobers night time festival. Out of the hundreds, maybe thousands of people who had attended, forty eight people were killed outright, almost fifty more dying in the following days due to injuries, killing themselves out of mental trauma and poison laced festival food and drink. Countless hundreds bore injuries and scars from that nightmarish night, not all of them physical. The worst case of physiological damage had been a (At the time) six year old girl named Haruno Sakura who had somehow convinced herself that she had gotten her father blatantly murdered that day and blamed herself completely for his death. Even after a year of some of the best work that the Yamanaka had ever preformed in helping the mentally stained, the girl was only now starting to respond positivity to the treatments.

They had learned who the mastermind behind the attack was days later. There had been a few theories as to who had been behind it and why they had done it, but it wasn't until a strange jack in the box with a note saying 'To the old man, love Sea U. Pea" appeared on his desk without anyone seeing how it got there that Hiruzen knew exactly who had murdered and maimed his people. Relocating the box to the roof and ordering the tower vacated before summoning a shadow clone to open the box ( A wise move on his behalf. He still shuddered at the memory of his clone choking to death while laughing uncontrollably after being exposed to the poison gas cloud that the box had unleashed when it had been opened.). At the bottom of the box there had been a letter expressing the former jounin of Konoha Rama Sha's displeasure at not being personally invited to a party celebrating the fourth hokages death and explaining his hopes that the problem will be fixed before the next party was organized.

Naturally, the festival itself was canceled without a single complainant from anyone. Ordering countless training excursus and drills to be performed by all members of Konoha's armed and civilian ranks, the third began a campaign to ready his village for the subtle threat that Rama was coming back. By the time of the first anniversary of the 'Jester killings', Konoha could have taken on three invading armies coming from different directions at once and be able to hold its own. Nothing happened. No Rama. No invading army. Nothing. There was nothing on the eleventh or twelfth either. There were whispers that the Hokage had become overly paranoid due to the attack the year before and suggestions on who was going to replace him were running rampant by the end of the day.

On October the thirteenth (By sheer chance a Friday.), an army of thugs, rouge ronin, missing ninja and just about every kind of scum that could be bribed, hired, lured or simply threatened to serve the S ranked missing ninja appeared in the heart of the land of Fire and launched an invasion to seize the capital city, attempting to storm the daimyō's palace in the process.

Without the vigilant training they had undergone, Konoha's forces wouldn't have had the chance to arrive in time to not only save the daimyō, but also half the city as well. It also greatly reduced the number of friendly casualties while maximizing the enemy death toll. All rumors of the Third's incompetence to lead the village were silenced on this day.

While the bulk of his forces were being purged from the world of the living, Rama himself and a few loyal henchmen had fled the capital shortly after the battle began. While he managed to slip by the bulk of the fire nations united coalition forces (Named as such in the aftermath of the battle since the numerous non shinobi factions who had already been fighting against the invading mercenary army to protect their city joined up with the ninja from Konoha almost as soon as they joined the battle), a small scouting party were able to pick up his trail and pursued the insane bastard to an abandoned and forgotten fortress that he must have been using for a lair. While it might have been a ruin at one stage, it had been repaired and improved by its new owner. With a mastery of traps, sealing tricks and what the scouting party had learned was nothing short of an army of goons still at his call, Rama had entrenched himself heavily here. Unable to learn anything more, the scouts started the twenty one hour trip to Konoha with their report.

On October the fifteenth, Hiruzen sent out a summon to twenty of his best to meet him in his office in order to assign them the mission of a lifetime... to hunt down and terminate the missing ninja Sha Rama and put an end to the threat he posed to Konoha.

That had been two days ago and the Third hadn't gotten a single report back from his elite yet. That wasn't strange though. When hunting someone like Rama, even the slightly thing out of place might alert him to the presence of the hunting party. Hiruzen would rather wait three days and hear nothing from the team in the field so they could bring back Rama's head then demand a report from the teams he had sent and never see any of them again.

Fiddling with the pipe in his mouth, he cracked the saw bones in his neck as he looked at a paper trail that had haunted him and Konoha for too damn long. It had taken a matter of hours to empty the achieves of his tower of every single piece of paper that even bore Rama's name and dump it on his desk. Everything from the birth certificate he had been given shortly after he had been abandoned on the orphanage door step to the more outlandish reports on his rumored achievements. He had gone through this pile many times over the decades, seeking insight into the mad man's mind. Every time he looked through it, it just kept getting longer and more horrifying with each reading. Hell, he had on more then one occasion thought about copying it all out and sending it all to Jiraiya's publisher so he could retire off the cold hard cash that the no doubt award winning book would bring him.

…...

But all stories have to start somewhere.

Rama's began when he was dumped at the Konoha orphanage when he was a few days, maybe even a week old at best. There had been a war going on at the time so orphans were quite common in those days, but Rama was special. Both of his parents had been alive when they had dropped him off at the orphanage and according to the matron at the time they appeared to be rather well off when it came to buying fancy things. She had had a habit of writing down any last words that the parents had to say to their children in order to give them something when they were older. Hiruzen had been sickened by the final words that Rama's father had to say to his son all those decades ago and looking at the single strip of yellow paper in front of him he still felt the same about the foul words that he did then.

'Just be glad we didn't throw you into the woods for the wolves when you started crying last night on the road.'

Placing the birth certificate and last words aside, Hiruzen felt his age at the sight of Sha's application into the academy. It was one of the older versions of the form that they had stopped using almost twenty years ago. Under normal conditions, the number of orphans that enlisted in the academy were low. But in times of war the unwanted children were given encouragement to sign up. Age limits that were normally strictly followed were dropped in favor of getting more soldiers on the field. Rama had been one of the few to jump at the chance, signing up for the program without a second thought or regret.

While it wasn't written down, Hiruzen had been there personally when Rama handed his papers in. He had been a completely different person back then. Brown hair, blue eyed and a healthy tan, Rama would have been picked up by a happy family had times been different. He had been such a sweet and caring boy, and the few friends he did have he was devoutly loyal too.

It was also that same day that Rama first met Minato. The unwanted clanless orphan meeting the beloved solo heir of the somewhat small Namikaze clan. It was a meeting to remember. Never before had he encountered a pair who honestly hated each other with such passion from the get go. It seemed that no matter what either of them said, it got on the others nerves. At one stage during the day, Hiruzen had to forcefully hold Minato and Rama apart to prevent them from strangling each other.

This had been a common thing to happen between the two of them for years to come. If he remembered correctly... Placing the application papers to the side, the Professor of the ninja world smiled as he saw the ANBU report that had been underneath it. Just after the two of them had graduated the academy, a ramen stand had opened up. While the stand itself wasn't that big, the opening night had been big news for both of them. The report itself detailed the brawl that had started when the owner and chief Ichiraku made the mistake of making a big deal out of the first bowl of Ramen he served. The fight over the bowl between Minato and Rama quickly became the thing of legends and was used as free advertising for years to come. Some of the older locals still remembered the old slogan.

'What would you do for a bowl of Ichiraku's Ramen?'

Carefully returning the old ANBU report to its rightful place on the desk, the Third decided to skip over a number of mission reports. He had read them all before and none of them had given him any sort of clue as to the mystery of Sha Rama... not even the one missing report that he knew personally as the beginning of the end.

Finding it underneath the paperwork for Rama's promotion to chuunin, it was clear that it was different from all the others. Rama had been one of those squad leaders that at least put a little effort into his reports, so it was quite strange when all he had handed in as a report with no other detail then 'Failed' written on it.

That failure had been an assassination mission in which three squads lost their lives and the target survived. Rama managed to escape with one of the other squad leaders, who was in a critical condition when he brought her in. They had only been married for three days before they had been sent of that mission.

Hiruzen sighed sadly at the memory of that day. In a cruel twist of fate, the one woman who could have saved Sha Rin had left for what she vowed was for good little more then an hour beforehand. Rin died in Rama's arms because one of the great sannin had decided to indulge in self pity...

That was just the beginning...

When it came to light that Rama had completely abandoned the mission in order to try and get his wife medical help, he was completely blacklisted by the village at large. Friends refused to have anything to do with him and since he had no family to fall back on Rama was completely alone. Unable to take any missions, Rama went to work in research and development. One night, three weeks after his wife's death, he started to pump his body full of untested, high risk drugs and chemicals in an attempt to kill himself. In a way, it worked.

Sha Rama, loyal member of Konoha and a kind and caring human being died that night. Rama Sha, the green haired monstrous insane clown who murdered and tortured people because it was funny was born.

Hiruzen was about to look at the report of the first sighting of the new Rama when a knock interrupted him from his thoughts. Completely on auto-pilot, he answered the knock with a "Come in."

Standing in the doorway was one of the ANBU agents he had stationed at the message tower. 'Crow' simply gave a bow before giving his report. While normally such a report would require some privacy, this one was going to go public soon enough anyway.

"Lord Hokage, we have just gotten word from squad leader Raven. The S ranked missing ninja and traitor to Konoha Sha Rama is confirmed dead by dental records of his earthly remains."

For a few moments, silence filled the hokage's office. While Hiruzen knew that Sha had become a monster that needed to be taken down for the safety of the village, a part of him still remembered what he had been like before the madness had taken hold of him. He truly regretted that it had to come to this, but there had been no other choice.

"Thank you Crow. If there anything else to report?"

Nodding his head, the masked man code named Crow started to finish the message given to him to the suddenly very old hokage. "There is something else. Raven reports that they have found the 'Red Death's' fox cub that Rama stole alive and are bringing him home. They will be back by tomorrow morning."

While the older man's face didn't change from the poker face he had set up, the air itself seemed to fill with his shock. "I... see. Thank you Crow. You may return to your duties."

Once the man with the mask of a Crow had left, Hiruzen simply looked at the wall with a single thought in his head... a thought he had disregarded as a false hope almost a year ago.

Naruto was still alive...

AN: I know this one is a little short, but it was needed.

I hope you've enjoyed the insight into who Rama is and how he came to be that way.

I know this hasn't really been funny so far, but in two chapters that will change. I promise.

Please give me some reviews. It's disheartening when all my work gets is silence. If you don't tell me what you are thinking, I'm going to start imagining what your thinking and torture myself for days on end. Is that what you want?

Thanks for reading my work so far. Peace out!